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Beautiful Women

Tyler Cowen's article on why some countries have a disproportionately higher number of beautiful women has several interesting comments from readers. Rather than the usual suspects of ethnicity, genetics, diet, life-style and such which might result in a certain group of women (and men) looking more appealing than others, readers suggest a whole slew of other factors - repeated conquests of a country by foreigners (assuming these foreigners almost always were better looking than the natives, this makes sense), incentives for women to look their best in societies where there the available pool of potential husbands is small and more.

The other theory is that women are getting more and more beautiful over the generations while men remain at the same level of aesthetic appeal as their cavemen ancestors. Ouch ! If that were really true, women would not kill themselves trying to look skinny and plastic beautiful. After all, it should not be that hard to appeal to cavemen. Yet, the fashion, surgical and cosmetic enhancement business is flourishing like never before.

Just to throw yet another random theory out there, I would suggest that women today are going overboard with this whole beauty business because they are increasingly moving away from their gender stereotype. There is no longer anything a man can do that an woman cannot as well. Merely her gender, does not make her feel feminine so she needs something more to reaffirm it to herself and the world at large - so looking beautiful is as important as it is.
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Anonymous said…
in bengali there is saying banyaera bane sunder sisura matre krare, this is the main reason ,no body looks good. you have to do some thing to look good. man are lack of manly quality in look and habit as well as woman. beauty is not that how you look.
5:43 PM
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